Many of you have pointed out the inaccuracies of alexa rankings. That is certainly true. In order to improve the accuracy of this list I worked with a few other measures of popularity until I found the combination that seemed to fit the best. This list seems to make more sense to me than the previous ones. For instance, Jay Guin gets more traffic than I do but I always beat him on Alexa. Now he ranks ahead of me. I am fairly certain Trey Morgan and I get comparable traffic and we are ranked next to each other. Those with lesser traffic but good alexa ranks skewed to the high side dropped in the rankings, as they should.
Notes of interest:
- Al Maxey overtook Edward Fudge
- Laura Coppinger has 1180 subscribers!?! I am humbled
- Shane Coffman has to give up his rank above Terry Rush. Terry, you can pay me later or just let me teach a class at Tulsa some time. Oh wait, I think Shane is in charge of that now. Oops.
- Trey Morgan finally got a higher rank. He should have been ranked higher all along.
- Christopher Heard makes his start on the list at #6! Have a look at his blog. It is quality.
The process:
I took the alexa rankings and the google subscriptions and ranked all the blogs by both. I then calculated each blogs average rank from those two. Maxey and Fudge are a little different than a blog and so I left them out of the mix since the google rank is not evident (if anyone can figure out their google rank let me know). Where there was a tie alexa took priority in ranking. So what you see below is a ranking of the average ranking of alexa and google reader subscriptions with (alexa, google) in parentheses:
- Al Maxey (112k, 0)
- Edward Fudge (136k, 0)
- Laura Coppinger (260k, 1180)
- Jim Martin (465k, 245)
- Jay Guin (341k, 122)
- Christopher Heard (728k, 224)
- Mike Cope (1m, 420)
- Matt Dabbs (226k, 112)
- Trey Morgan (1.2m, 302)
- John Mark Hicks (1.4m, 186)
- Patrick Mead (1.7m, 147)
- Tim Spivey (1.5m, 37)
- Larry James (2.9m, 157)
- Tim Archer (768k, 33)
- Wade Hodges (2.3m, 103)
- Grace Conversation (1.8m, 42)
- John Dobbs (2.4m, 90)
- Craig Ford (606k, 27)
- Bobby Valentine (3.6m, 138)
- Milton Stanley (3.3m, 115)
- Keith Lancaster (3m, 39)
- Brian Nicklaus (2.6m, 45)
- Joshua Graves (3.3m, 50)
- Mitchell Skelton (600k, 10)
- Adam Faughn (2.6m, 33)
- Keith Brenton (4m, 51)
- Peter Horne (547k, 3)
- Alan Rouse (3.2m, 32)
- Wes Woodell (2m, 20)
- Darin Hamm (1.9m, 14)
- Kinney Mabry (5.2m, 76)
- Jim McGuiggan (3.2m, 26)
- Matthew Morine (906k, 2)
- Philip Cunningham (2.6m, 19)
- Toddblog (2.1m, 11)
- Ocular Fusion (3.9m, 30)
- Terry Rush (7m, 104)
- Shane Coffman (4m, 32)
- Cecil Hook (1.6m, 0)
- Wade Tannehill (3.8m, 18)
- Jonathan Storment (4.4m, 31)
- Phil Sanders (6.4m, 45)
- Chris Gallagher (4.2m, 25)
- Nick Gill (5.3m, 31)
- Danny Dodd (7.2m, 46)
- Phil Ware (4m, 21)
- Frank Bellizzi (5.1m, 28)
- Todd Deaver (7.2m, 40)
- Dallas Burdette (3.3m, 1)
- Bill Williams (7m, 29)
- Royce Ogle (5.4m, 20)
- Lane Widick (4.8m, 9)
- Gil Yoder (3.7m, 0)
- Jerry Starling (4.1m, 3)
- Rex Butts (6.5m, 23)
- Political Cartel (5m, 9)
- Roger Butner (4.9m, 2)
- Terry Laudette (6.4m, 16)
- Greg Kendall-Ball (5.4m, 7)
- Greg England (5.6m, 2)
0 Responses
I’m 1.9m, not 2.2 :p
Doh – never mind. Didn’t read the top part of your post.
Thanks again for mentioning my blog. I appreciate it. 🙂
Umm that took so time.
May we continue for His glory!
I understand that in Alexa, lower is better. How does the Google ranking work? And where do you find it?
i’ve seen Jay post about this before, but i have to say, i have very little grasp of what exactly this means. i get that it has something to do with internet popularity. But would you mind briefly explaining what the various numbers mean?
–Guy
Guy,
Alexa:
Alexa is a ranking of websites. #1 would indicate the most visited site in the world (www.google.com). A rank of 100k means that site is the 100,000th most visited site on the web. The problem is, it is just an estimate and is often wrong when compared to real traffic numbers.
Google:
Google has a feed reader (similar to bloglines) that basically updates you of new content so you don’t have to go searching all your favorite blogs to see if there is something new. The number I used was the number of google reader subscribers a given blog has. In order to see this you have to log into a google account, go to the google reader web site and click the add subscription button and do a search. That will tell you how many readers a particular blog has. So this is another measure of popularity.
So all blogs on this list were ranked in comparison to each other on alexa rank and google subscribers and the ranks averaged to get the over all rank.
Hope that is helpful!
i THINK i get it now. Thanks. But the google feed readers number wouldn’t take into account email subscriptions or blogspot followers would it?
–Guy
Right…it won’t account for all your subscribers. That would be very time consuming to calculate as there are dozens of ways to subscribe and I wouldn’t even be able to have access to all of them. I guess I could just poll all these bloggers and ask what is there average daily traffic over the last month. That would be the most accurate way.
Thanks for putting in the time Matt!
Grace and peace,
Tim Archer
wow, matt,
you can be expecting a call from the BCS folks soon to clear up this TCU, Boise St, etc. situation.
Here’s a post on Seth Godin’s blog about comparing sites. I haven’t checked out the sites, but maybe they will help:
https://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/12/discoverthetruth.html
Grace and peace,
Tim Archer
I’m stunned. Literally stunned. Since I’ve moved to wordpress, and since I’ve changed gears on a lot of my topics, I’ve gotten a ton more hits. Plus, Mitchell Skelton put a link on his blog to mine.
Never even thought I’d be in the top 1000. As long as we keep trying our best to put good Christian writings and reviews out there in the cyber-world, it matters not where any of us are ranked, but it is neat to see.
What site were you with before? And what particular shifts have you made in your topics?
–Guy
I was on Blogger/Blogspot for about 3 years.
I am now on WordPress. I like how on WordPress it makes it easier to tag and categorize each post.
When I was on Blogger, I was strictly in youth ministry. Now I’ve moved into Associate and Worship ministry, and my topics have expanded greatly. I plan on writing some thoughts on Youth Ministry in the churches of Christ soon.